Tag Archives: people are awesome

Sometime around May 1st, the good people of Norway started jumping into the cold water, naturally daring their friends to repeat the feat or suffer the consequences. Consequences started out being owing someone a beer, a bottle of wine or a dinner. But then, somehow, sometime, someone thought: “well this all seems a bit selfish, I cannot in good conscience tell my friends to freeze or pay me. But hey! I can ask my friends to freeze or pay THE CANCER SOCIETY!”.

And, lo and behold, pay the good people of Norway did. In a couple of hours, I went from vaguely registering that “hm, perhaps there is quite a bit more donating going on today than usually”, to being blown away an avalanche of good deeds.

This is me. Surprised by an avalanche of good deeds.

Over the course of two weeks, 3,5 million NOK (approx. US$600.000, €430.000 and £350.000) was donated to the Norwegian Cancer Society alone. Keep in mind that there are only 5 million Norwegians all together, and quite a few of those are bound to be infants or very, very old. So this is a momentous amount, actually more than 10% of what we raise in our annual two-week fundraiser Krafttak mot kreft, which takes a year to plan and has 20.000 people knocking on doors.

This amount of “random” money suddenly flowing in is flat out insane. But lordy-lord we’re happy about it! Actually we’re so happy that we too jumped into the cold waters of Oslo, at 850.000 NOK (we thought we were at the peak. We were oh-so-wrong). I’m in this bunch of my colleagues jumping in. I’m aqua-phobic (and it’s COLD), so I expect high praise for this, I’ll have you know.

Number one stat you need to know: Without mobile, you’re toast

More than 70% of all donations given came from a mobile phone – not even counting tablets. This includes text-donations and credit card donations from a mobiles browser. I will say that again, as it needs repeating. I shit you not:

More than 70% of all #Hoppihavet-donations came from a mobile phone!

Have a look at this beauty of a pretty stacked graph:

Number of donation by medium. Text is pink, web-donations (credit card) split into mobile (green), tablet (purple) and desktop/laptop (blue). Note how Eurovision Song Contest-day makes a noticeable dip in donations!

That ginormous pink slab, is the number of text donations. And we’re not talking micro donation texts, the majority are 200 NOK (US$34, €25, £20) a piece. Add to that the green slab which are donations made by credit card on our website in a mobile browser, and you have 70-75% of the pie. On mobile phones. In other words; money that would not have come had we not been optimized for mobile.

Looking at the beginning and the end of this graph, where the blue desktop-line is the dominant one, tells you a lot. That is the status quo of everyday donating. But as soon as spur-of-the-moment takes over, as soon as donating becomes spontaneous, mobile is the absolute go-to-medium for most of us. Again we see that context is more important than device.

More than half the donations came from text

When donating becomes spontaneous, mobile is the go-to-medium.

Our webpage is responsive, and thus easy to navigate on a phone. Our donation forms are available to mobile users. Our text-to-donate codes are easy to find. If this was not the case, we wouldn’t have gotten half the donations we did.

Fun facts and sums:

On the busiest days of this absolute banana-fest of giving, more than 10%of ALL visitors to the cancer society web page made a donation. I cannot begin to stress how out of the ordinary that is. Our site is made primarily for patients and next of kin. Most come to check out symptoms etc, they do not come to donate.

For the first two weeks of May, The “Thank you for donating”-page (that you only get to after giving) was the fifth most viewed page on the entire Cancer Society website.

The busiest days saw 1 donation pr minute on average (counting all 24 hours).

The busiest hours saw roughly 4-6 donations pr minute

70% of mobile views came from an Apple product (no surprise)

100% of the 1 person who visited from a blackberry donated. Thank you!

Eurovision Song Contest (May 10th) made a more noticeable dip in donations than Norways Constitution Day (May 17th), see graph above.People were apparently too busy voting for Conchita to donate.

57% of web conversions came from google. Which means that even as people sit down to make a donation to the cancer society, which has a URL exactly like our name, people still google the task and come in that way. The second biggest source are the 18% who came directly by typing the url, followed by 13 % who came from facebook. Of donors who came from facebook, 70% where from the mobile view.

What can we learn from this?

Well, if you’re looking for advice on how to create some viral trend that makes the money roll in, I can’t help you. We didn’t start this, people did. And that’s why it worked, in my opinion. Just like the #Nomakeupselfie that got so big in the UK, the charities who benefited had nothing to do with starting it. That is one of my favorite things about digital fundraising; it’s utterly unpredictable and all you can do is be prepared. Paul deGregorio has written a beautiful little piece on these trends. I recommend you read it.

Here’s what I think are the important parts of what we do to be ready:

Near 24/7 social media surveillance. This means we pick up on emerging trends early, and can start to get ready as soon as we see something that has the potential to go big.

Knowing our numbers. Once we noticed something brewing i social media, we could immediately look at our analytics and confirm the trend. We could in a couple of minutes find out exactly how much (more than usual) had been given.

Information sharing. As soon as we picked up on this, the information about what, how much and relevant statements were sent out to all internal stakeholders. This way, we were ready to answers any questions from the press or public.

Being ready to jump. Don’t think that there is any way you can throw gas on these flames; you can’t. But if you’re good and lucky, you might be able to fuel it with some kindling. I think we managed that, by quickly acknowledging the trend in our social channels and in the press, keeping people updated on the amounts donated, thanking people in social media, and of course, by showing genuine joy and appreciation and jumping into the water ourselves.

Being ready for mobile! This one deserves an exclamation mark.

Sit back and let the people have fun. There’s not much you can do to make these things happen. So don’t try – you’ll only embarrass yourself. Be the facilitator when someone wants to do something for you, and be happy when you’re the benefactor of something amazing.

Let us all take a moment to reflect on the fact that PEOPLE ARE AWESOME!